Red Planet Blues

EIGHTEEN





Ithink we should get out of here,” I said into my headset microphone.

“We can’t leave the Alpha exposed to looters,” Pickover replied.

“Rory, we’re defenseless.”

“The fossils are defenseless.”

“Damn it!” I intended the curse for him, but as I said it, the distant Mars buggy started moving in, kicking up a plume of dust as it did so, and Pickover took the words as a response to that.

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re barreling directly toward us.”

The radio we were using was supposed to be encrypted, but whoever was coming at us now might have bribed the guy I rented my suit from to reveal the encryption code. The person or persons in that Mars buggy might well be listening in on everything I said to Pickover, and so now knew that they’d been spotted.

When two biologicals didn’t want to use radio on the surface, they touched their helmets together and let the sound pass between them. Pickover wasn’t wearing a helmet. I wondered if he’d opted for super hearing as well as super vision—although I couldn’t imagine what use the former would be for a fossil hunter. I turned off my radio and shouted, “They might be listening in on our communications.”

The Martian atmosphere was only about one percent as thick as Earth’s; it conducted sound, but not very well. Pickover was looking at me but it was clear that he hadn’t heard what I’d said. I walked over to him and motioned for him to stand still. I then leaned my helmet against his artificial head.

“I say!” he exclaimed as I did so.

I spoke only slightly louder than normal. “They may have been listening to our radio. Turn yours off.” I pulled my head away, and he nodded but didn’t do anything else, again making me wonder how that worked for a transfer—what did he do inside his mind that deactivated the transmitter? But although I could make noise—my helmet was pressurized—his jaw was flapping in the tenuous Martian air and wasn’t making any sound I could hear. I was good at reading lips—a marketable skill for a detective—but the restrained movements of his were different enough from those of a biological that I wasn’t able to make out what he was saying.

I touched my helmet to his forehead—the only time in recent memory that I’d done something similar was head-butting a drunk at The Bent Chisel. “I can’t hear you,” I said loudly. “Let’s separate. They can only come after one of us in that vehicle. You stay here. I’ll see if I can draw them away from the Alpha, okay?”

He nodded his head; it slid against the helmet. It was fortunate that his hair was synthetic; the last thing I needed was a smear of oil obscuring my vision through the fishbowl. Having finished quarterbacking our next play, I snapped, “Break!” and started running in a direction perpendicular to the incoming buggy.

I could run like the wind inside the dome—but the surface suit and air tanks added fifty kilos to my normal ninety, and the layer of dust on the plain made it hard to get good footing. Still, I put everything I had into it, hoping the intruder would go after me: it was the nature of all predators, human or otherwise, to chase after someone who was trying to escape. Looking to my right, it did seem the buggy—still some distance off—was veering toward me.

Of course, I had no idea what I’d do if whoever it was did intercept me. Even if they didn’t have a gun, anything that would smash my helmet would do to finish me off out here.

My heart was pounding, and I was sweating inside the suit—which was not a good thing: I was fogging up the fishbowl. The suit did have dehumidifier controls, but I’d have to stop running to fiddle with them, and I didn’t want to do that. And since the fog was on the inside of the helmet, I couldn’t wipe it away with my hands, either, and—

And damn! The surface of Mars was littered with rocks, and my boot caught on one, and I went flying. At least I came back down in slo-mo; I had plenty of time to brace myself for the impact. I looked toward the buggy and could make it out in more detail now. It was yellow—not an uncommon color for such things—and it had a pressurized habitat, meaning whoever was chasing me was more likely biological than not.

I scrambled to my feet and started running again. There was no doubt now that the buggy was coming at me, rather than Pickover. I’d expected it to rush right up to me, but it skidded to a stop about seventy meters away, spinning through a half turn. Ah, it had come to the periphery of the Alpha, and the driver had slammed on the brakes; either they knew about the land mines, or they didn’t want to risk damaging any exposed fossils by driving over them.

The buggy’s boxy habitat swung backward on hinges, and I saw the white cloud of condensation that occurs when breathable air is vented into the Martian atmosphere. Coming through the cloud were two figures in surface suits. The helmets were polarized, so I couldn’t see who was inside, but the person on my left, wearing a red suit, was a curvy female, and the one on my right, in a blue suit, had the bulk of a man. The woman was carrying what might have been a pump-action shotgun, although where someone would get such a thing on Mars, I had no idea; it’s not like they were needed to kill varmints here.

They started running toward me, and I now weaved left and right as I ran. I wasn’t sure what I was running for—there was no shelter, although I thought hills were starting to peek over the horizon, which suggested we might be near Syrtis Major.

I looked to my left, trying to spot Pickover, but couldn’t make him out. I looked back to my right and saw the woman in red fire the shotgun. There was almost no report from the blast in this thin air, but I saw the lick of flame. She didn’t come anywhere near to hitting me—suggesting she wasn’t experienced with a gun.

When they weren’t weighed down by surface suits, you could see at a glance if a runner was new to Mars or not; it took a while to get the hang of sailing so far with each stride. But I couldn’t tell about this woman. The man, though, was an old hand; he was close enough now that I could make out details of the suit he was wearing. It had an old-fashioned helmet that was glass only at the front. No one rented suits like that anymore, so this guy probably owned his—and had for at least ten mears.

Another blast from the shotgun. If they hit me in the suit, it probably wouldn’t kill me; the pressure-webbing in the fabric would double nicely as a reasonably bulletproof lining. But although the helmet was impact resistant, it wasn’t shatterproof; alloquartz did a great job of screening out UV, and wouldn’t break if you dropped it—especially in Mars’s gravity—but the warranties specifically disclaimed micrometeorite damage, and I imagined lead shot coming in at high speed was a good approximation of such impacts.

I decided to reactivate my radio. I did that by hitting a control in the suit collar with my chin; it was just to the left of the tube that snaked around from behind, bringing air into the fishbowl. “Pickover,” I said, “remember, they may be listening in. Don’t tell me where you are—but I’m heading west, and they’ve opened fire on me.”

The cultured English accent: “Roger.”

Another male voice on the same circuit, half out of breath from running. “Professor Pickover, is that you?”

Pickover, surprised: “Yes. Who is this?”

“Professor, my name’s Darren Cheung. I’m with the United States Geological Survey. We thought you were someone looting the fossil beds.”

“It’s a trick, Pickover!” I shouted.

But the little paleontologist wasn’t as naïve as I feared. “The girls can flirt and other queer things can do,” he said. If it was a code for me, I didn’t know it. He added, “What’s that mean?”

“Professor,” said the same male voice, “we’re wasting time.”

Pickover’s voice was harsh. “Get him, Alex.”

I appreciated his faith in me, but I didn’t have any idea just then how to get him—or the woman who was also closing rapidly. There was another blast—visual, not aural—from the shotgun, and this time I was hit in the shoulder. The impact knocked me sideways, and I sent up a dust cloud when I fell. Beneath the dust, there were loose rocks. I grabbed one about the size of a grapefruit, scrambled to my feet, and continued running. My shoulder hurt, but the suit seemed intact, and—

And, no, damn it, there was a chip out of my helmet. It hadn’t broken all the way through, but the structure had doubtless weakened; another hit, and I’d be sucking in nothing but thin carbon dioxide.

The man was slightly outpacing the woman, and that was working to my advantage—she seemed reluctant to shoot again with him in front of her; perhaps she was worried about going wide enough of her mark to hit him instead of me.

I had no such compunctions. The man was now close enough that I could throw my rock at him. All that bench-pressing at Gully’s paid off, and I had plenty of experience throwing things under Martian gravity—as Buttrick at The Bent Chisel could testify. I hit the man right in the faceplate, and it cracked in a spider-web pattern that probably obscured his vision but I didn’t think was going to result in him gasping for breath, unfortunately.

Still, it slowed him down enough that the woman was now in front again, and she brought the shotgun up to her red-suited shoulder. She was clearly about to fire when Pickover’s voice burst into my helmet, and hers, too, presumably. “Look out, Alex!”

I swung my head to the right and saw our Mars buggy rushing toward us, a great cloud going up behind it. As I leapt to one side, I was touched that Pickover was willing to drive over his precious fossil beds to rescue me. He slammed the brakes in a way that would have made a screeching sound in a real atmosphere, and popped the clear habitat roof open. I leapt in, and he put his metal to the pedal. I thought he was going to take us through a wide one-eighty, but instead he aimed directly for the woman in red. I struggled to pull the lid down over the habitat as he continued to roar toward her, clearly aiming to mow her down. But she was aiming, too—right at us.

That the woman was reasonably new to Mars was now obvious. The best way to stop a car on Earth was to shoot out the pneumatic tires, but we favored springy wiry things. The angle between the spokes changed constantly under computer control, and each spoke led not to a continuous rim but to a separate pad. A camera up front watched for obstacles, and the spokes configured themselves to make it possible to go over most rocks without even touching them. Trying to shoot such wheels out was useless, but she nonetheless fired at our left front tire—and it didn’t slow us down at all.

The man in the blue suit started running back toward their yellow Mars buggy. He wasn’t going as fast as he’d been before; I suspect he’d slowed down not so much out of fatigue—having a guy hurtling toward you in a motorized vehicle tended to get the old adrenaline going—but because he was having trouble seeing through the cracks in his faceplate.

Pickover had to make a choice: go after the woman with the gun or after the apparently unarmed man who had a chance of getting back to his buggy. I could think of arguments for either selection, and didn’t gainsay the one Rory made: he decided to pursue the woman, who was running like the wind.

There was no way she could outrace us on a flat surface, but even a planitia has some craters on it, like God had peppered it with his own shotgun. She was heading straight for the one I’d noticed before; it was maybe thirty meters across. The crater wall rose in front of us. To get up it, she had to drop the shotgun, and it skittered with Martian indolence down the crater face. She scrambled up, gloves clawing for purchase. Damn, but I wished I had my gun! It would have been easy to take her out while her back was to us. Our springy wheels did their best, but when the slope exceeded forty-five degrees, they weren’t able to get enough traction, and we started backsliding.

I unlatched the habitat lid, and it fell open, letting me hop out. The buggy managed to reverse its slide and climb back up a bit farther after the weight of me and my surface suit was no longer in it. But soon the slope proved too much again, and Pickover abandoned the buggy, too; the vehicle came to rest half-on and half-off the sloping, crumbling crater wall. I flipped open the trunk, exposing the land mines. The activation knob was on the underside of the mine, dead center, behind a little spring-loaded safety door. I reactivated both mines, and saw that the flags on their upper surfaces turned red. I then picked up one of the mines, supporting it underhanded by its rim.

The man had succeeded in his retreat; I could see him in the distance clambering into their buggy. I’d thought he was going to hightail it away from here, but he came charging toward us again. I chinned my radio: “One warning only: get out of the buggy!”

It was possible that the damage to his helmet had wrecked his microphone in addition to impairing his vision. Or maybe he just didn’t feel inclined to take orders from me. Either way, he kept racing my way at a clip I couldn’t outrun. I took a bead on the approaching vehicle, and flung the land mine the way you’d toss a discus. It spun through the air and—

Ka-blam!

—hit the flat front of the buggy’s habitat, exploding on impact. The canopy was reduced to crystalline shards that went flying. I saw the man in the blue suit throw up his arms, trying to cover his face—

His exposed face: the glass visor of his helmet was gone. He gasped for breath—and I imagine he felt the linings of his lungs seizing up in the wicked cold of an equatorial Martian day.

His vehicle was still moving, though—the habitat was wrecked, but the chassis was intact and those big wheels kept on rolling, propelling it at high speed along the wall of the crater and—God damn it!—straight toward me and our Mars buggy.

I ran as fast as I could, but the incoming vehicle plowed into our buggy, and the other land mine I’d activated in preparation for throwing it went off, and I watched as the axles snapped on the incoming yellow buggy and our buggy burst into flames that almost immediately were snuffed out by the carbon dioxide atmosphere.

We were all marooned in the middle of nowhere.